(BLOOMINGTON) - At the beginning of 2016 the City launched its data portal as part of Mayor Hamilton's B-Clear initiative.

The data portal, based on the CKAN open source data platform, is available at data.bloomington.in.gov and contains a growing number of datasets across the entire scope of government operations from public safety to water quality, from potholes to graffiti.

Performance Dashboard

The City committed in its 2017 Budget to make data-driven government a priority by specifying clear measurable goals in departmental budgets. The City's Information & Technology Services (ITS) Department is deploying and developing tools to make city performance on budget priorities and other goals visible to the public, City staff and City leadership. Building upon our data portal, we are pleased to announce the availability of our new performance dashboard tool at bloomington.in.gov/performance. This is an early release (a beta version) and we welcome feedback and suggestions from the public.

The performance dashboard is updated nightly. The data feeding the dashboard is drawn from Bloomington's open data portal and other internal data sources to provide insight into city operations and progress towards departmental and City goals.

Additional performance cards will be rolled out as new data sets are added. Additional sets and performance cards to be deployed in the coming weeks include ITS, Parks and Recreation, Bloomington Transit, and the Bloomington Police Department (BPD).

The public is encouraged to take a look and provide the City with feedback.

New Data: Bulk Open311

The City of Bloomington is also leading in producing comparative government data to compare performance across cities. In mid-September, Bloomington's ITS Department completed an update of the City's uReport citizen issue reporting system. This update included an export feature of Open311 citizen request data in the emerging Open311 GeoReport Bulk Data Standard.

Bloomington is among the first cities to provide data in this format which allows for comparative analysis with other cities. This sets the stage for comparative analysis across cities.

Bloomington's use of the new data specification was recently highlighted by the Center for Government Excellence on its blog at https://govex.jhu.edu/your-311-streamgraphed/. (Image courtesy of Andrew Nicklin, Center for Excellence in Government, John Hopkins University)

Many other cities are coming onboard publishing bulk 311 data as well, allowing for performance comparisons between cities. Mayor John Hamilton is pleased that Bloomington is among the first to provide the public with data in this open format.

New Data: Notable Data Sets

This year the City has posted several important data sets for public review, 73 as of this writing.

One of our datasets is unique and has received notice since the City joined the federal Police Data Initiative. BPD publishes a dataset on Officer Involved Shootings. Thankfully this dataset contains no data. This might not always be the case, but at this time it is a data set that we are proud to publish with no data in it.

The City has joined the White House Police data initiative Police Data Initiative.

Bloomington's data initiative has been recognized on the GovEx Blog (Center for Government Excellence at John Hopkins University).

City staff have been invited to White House data initiative conferences and are active participants in the community of cities which believe that data-driven performance is essential to making cities work for everyone.

Next Steps

Bloomington is an active contributor to the community of governments innovating around data-driven performance.

This coming year will reveal an expansion of data sets, data initiatives and the performance dashboard. Residents can help the City make even more data available by communicating what data is important to them at data.bloomington.in.gov. Residents are encouraged to submit a data set request.